


looking to see the trees

by Kitty Eden (TheBigCat)



Series: unfold your own myth [4]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Body Horror, Curse Breaking, Curses, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's complicated!, Nonbinary Doctor (Doctor Who), although they're kind of. not entirely present in this, not quite as grim as it sounds but ace has a bad mom!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26814397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/Kitty%20Eden
Summary: Going into the Lungbarrow Woods is a mistake that most people don’t make more than once. Most people are not Ace McShane.Or, Ace finds a half-buried body. Which is simultaneously a lot more and a lot less horrifying than it sounds.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane
Series: unfold your own myth [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1746379
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	looking to see the trees

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Murders by Miracle Musical.

Every parent in Little Caldwell tells their children not to go into the Lungbarrow Woods. It’s the sort of thing that is repeated so often and so insistently that it’s practically an eternal mantra in the back of every child’s mind. Don’t go into the woods. Don’t venture past the dark treeline, no matter how pretty the singing you hear is. If you _must_ enter the woods, stick to the path and don’t dawdle as you go. There’s so many dark things in the woods, waiting to catch you and eat you right up, and the fae will want to take you and play with you and never let you go until everyone you know and love is old and withered.

In any other town, it would be regarded widely as charming nonsense, the stuff of fairytales and late-night stories designed to frighten kids to sleep. But in Little Caldwell, it’s nothing of the sort – there is a cursed boy and a changeling girl in town who everyone knows to avoid, and it’s common knowledge that Claire Spencer disappeared from her job at the library ten years ago and showed up just a few weeks ago, looking as if no time had passed at all and none the wiser.

Staying out of the woods and not offending the Good Neighbours is more than just cautionary tales and superstition. It’s common sense, and the sort of common sense that, if followed, just might end up saving your life.

But the thing is, Ace’s mother has never told her not to go into the woods. She hasn’t told her to keep away from the dark treeline, and she certainly hasn’t warned her not to stray from the path. The last word of warning she gave her daughter, in fact, was a slurred angry notice to stay out of her way for the rest of the afternoon – Eastenders, apparently, is on, and it’s not something she wants to miss.

So that’s why Ace McShane, a tiny thirteen-year-old bundle of oversized jacket and grazed knees and angry adventurer’s spirit, is currently hiking through the Lungbarrow Woods with a sturdy stick she’s ripped from a dead tree and a rucksack packed with a hastily-thrown-together lunch and all of her important explorer’s supplies. She’s already passed the dark threshold, and she most certainly isn’t sticking to the rarely-travelled path. Anyone who’s lived in town for more than a few weeks could easily tell her that what she’s doing is an extraordinarily bad idea, but she’s only just moved in yesterday, and even if she did know, she’d probably just take it as a challenge anyway.

All things considered, she’s having a rather marvellous time of it. There’s plenty of oversized logs for her to clamber over, and leaves to push animatedly away from her face like she’s a real jungle explorer, and it’s that perfect time of afternoon where it’s just sunny enough for the light to reach her through the forest canopy but not hot enough for it to be all sweaty and unbearable. The forest is a far cry from anything she had been used to back in Perivale.

Half an hour into her forest expedition, she’s found a small stream that runs all the way through the middle of the forest, stuffed a bunch of useful-looking flowers and herbs into her rucksack for later, and bothered one entire deer (which had run off the moment she’d moved a bit too suddenly, but still – pretty cool), when she hears something that makes her skin tingle with something like excitement and something like terror.

It’s hard to place at first, but then she tilts her head just-so and it becomes recognizable as someone humming. There’s not really much of a melody to it, but it’s kind of pretty all the same, and it’s definitely a person, too. Human or not, it’s hard to tell, but if she had to pick, Ace would probably throw her bet on _not,_ because in addition to the humming being kind of pretty, it’s also pretty alluring. Like, she really desperately wants to follow that noise even though doing that is almost certainly a bad idea.

She takes a couple of steps in the direction that it’s coming from, and says, “If this is some trick to try to catch me and eat my bones, I’m just gonna let you know right now that I have a knife and I’m not afraid to use it.”

This is true, although she neglects to mention the fact that it is, in fact, a butter-knife and probably not much danger to anyone. (It’s stainless steel, though, so it might sting a bit for any fairy. That’s something, at least.)

The humming pauses for a second, and then starts up again, more insistently than before. Ace takes off in pursuit of it. The sound fluctuates a bit as she tramps through the leafy undergrowth – loud then soft then louder again, like whoever’s doing it is on the other end of a radio station that can’t quite decide where it’s meant to be tuned to.

She fiddles with the strap of her rucksack for a second or so as the humming fades gradually, becoming inaudible, and then sighs. It’s time to get witchy, apparently.

With a slight hop forwards and a little grunt of concentration, Ace tugs her jacket up around her and as she does she _shifts –_ skin melting into fur, spine bending over and growing smaller like the rest of her, and within seconds she’s scampering through the undergrowth on padded paws. As a cat, she’s a lot smaller but a whole lot quicker and climbing’s _so_ much more fun, even if she does tend to get stuck up trees a lot. It feels wrong doing this alone, but cat ears are much more sensitive and it’s easier to hear the faintly discordant humming when she’s like this.

She tracks the sound carefully, venturing deeper into the forest where the sun doesn’t shine through the leaves above quite as evenly and the air becomes dark and rich with the smell of damp earth. As she follows the noise it gets louder – and after a while, she has to shift back to human because the register it’s hitting is making her tiny cat head hurt like hell.

Just when she thinks that she’s never going to get to wherever she’s going, she breaks through into a sunny, gorgeously calm clearing, and the humming comes to an abrupt halt.

“Hello?” Ace calls, but there’s no response. She turns around slowly, taking in her surroundings. It’s not _perfectly_ circular, so she isn’t in the middle of some sort of fairy ring, which is... well, it’s something, at least. It’s all native flowers and foliage encircling a patchy section of soft springy grass and dirt. It’s sort of pretty in a natural, simple sort of way, but there’s not much there to speak of. Nothing _interesting,_ at least.

Ace starts heading over to the opposite side of the clearing, to see if there’s anything else in the vicinity worth noting – and almost immediately trips over something half-buried in the dirt at her feet. As she goes crashing to the ground, adding a few new scrapes and bruises to the collection she’s amassed so far today, she thinks, _should have been looking out for branches._ Assuming it’s a branch is sensible and normal, which is probably why it comes as such a shock when she sits up to brush the dirt off of herself, and looks down to see that the thing she’s just tripped over is an _arm._ Pale and ghostly underneath the layers of mud and grime, but still very visibly humanoid. It’s just sticking out of the ground at a slight angle – limp and unmoving.

Ace doesn’t scream, since she’s cool like that – although it’s a very near thing, because arms are _not_ supposed to be buried in the dirt like that and what if it’s a body? What are you even supposed to _do_ if you find a body in the woods – or what if it’s an arm _without_ the body, would that be worse somehow? She’s not sure – but ultimately, unbridles curiosity quickly overcomes that initial burst of fear, and she scrambles forwards to tug on the hand at the end of the arm experimentally. It refuses to budge, which means it’s probably attached to someone else. And although it’s cold, far too cold, when she tries to loop her fingers around the wrist (although her hands are a bit too small to make it all the way around) there’s an unmistakable thrum of life to the skin. A bit slow and lethargic, but she can definitely feel something like a pulse.

“Huh,” she says to herself, sitting back. She hadn’t even been _looking_ for a pulse in the first place.

She yanks off her rucksack, and goes searching through it for something to help her dig the rest of the buried person out quicker. She doesn’t have a shovel or anything, which she’s definitely going to have to fix in future, but she’s got the plastic container she’d been using for her lunch, and minus the lid that makes a perfect makeshift scooper.

She gets to work, and after a few minutes manages to uncover the rest of the arm and part of a torso. Whoever this person is, they’re a lot bigger than she is – probably an adult – and the clothes they’re wearing are _well_ weird. Not just in their design – who wears a coat with that amount of colors and designs all mashed together, anyway? – but the fact that none of them are even affected by the dirt that they’ve been buried in in the least. It looks like magic, and it even feels like magic, but not any sort of magic she’s used to.

An hour of digging, and she’s pretty much unearthed all of this mysterious buried person, and although their brightly-colored coat and general attire are pretty much untainted by dirt – although noticeably faded and worn – the same can’t be said for their skin and hair. And then there’s the thick loops of gnarled, twisted roots that loop around their chest and shoulders and waist, pinning them firmly down into the earth.

Ace grabs her pocketknife and sets to work hacking at these bonds, but they seem completely invulnerable to any sort of attack, and she doesn’t want to risk accidentally stabbing this person by mistake, even if that actually might end up getting them to wake up instead of snoozing absently into the dirt.

Speaking of which, _they just aren’t waking up._ And it’s really weird because they’re breathing a bit shallowly and a bit too slowly, just like their pulse, but mostly it’s _okay_ breathing, even though they’ve been buried in the earth for god knows how long. It’s like the dirt doesn’t even affect them.

Actually.

She can’t focus on their face properly, and she can see the faint point to their ears, so she figures she can probably safely say that they’re not human. She’s never met a fairy before, but some of the witchy books she’d read back in Perivale mentioned them. Said a lot of stuff about not giving your name to them, not making them angry, and to never try to cut a deal, but they never mentioned anything about finding fairies buried in the dirt or how to wake them up from weird magical comas.

That’s the other thing, actually – Ace is pretty sure that this is some sort of curse. She’s pretty new to witchy stuff. She’s never actually _met_ another witch, not unless you count – but, no. Everything she knows she’s taught herself from books and friend-of-a-friend sort of stuff, and it goes pretty well for her except when it doesn’t, because there’s only so much you can get from books.

Curses, however, are mostly well-covered in most magic texts, no matter how shady and/or vague they are. Ace knows curses and the theory pretty well – she’s dished out a few, even, although they’re mostly along the lines of those overrated bad-luck hexes where you can’t _really_ tell if they’ve taken effect, you just kind of have to hope and guess. But there’s a certain sort of magical vibe you get off curses, no matter how indistinct they are. A kind of acidic bite, if you know where to look for it. And Ace knows where to look for it.

Carefully, she reaches for the fairy person’s arm again and presses her fingernails lightly against their artery – and instantly receives a sudden, undiluted blast of the strongest, sourest magic that she’s ever felt in her life. She reels backwards, gagging; and has to actively struggle against vomiting. _Yeah,_ that’s a curse, and a wicked nasty one, too. She can’t comprehend the layers of magical intent woven into it – she’s only barely mastered shifting into animal form – but she _can_ understand that it’s definitely why the roots are holding this person into the dirt and why they’re asleep, and it’s not hard to miss how much malice and hatred has been crafted into every inch of it.

“Someone hates you a whole lot,” she gasps in the fairy’s direction, fighting back the last vestiges of nausea. She tilts her head at them, trying to work out if they deserve it or not. It’s kind of hard to believe that _anyone_ does.

Although, to be fair, the multicolored coat they’re wearing is kind of unimaginably hideous.

But, no – crimes against fashion aside, there’s something about the flavor of the curse that’s just really horribly wrong and bad and, well, _evil_. And it’s not like she has anything else to do in this town yet. She might as well make a project of it.

The roots that are binding them into the ground are pretty shallow-running, although that doesn’t make them any easier to prise up. She can unearth them enough to expose them, but any attempt to pull them out of place just results in sore arms and blistered hands.

Working backwards and scooting along on her knees, she follows the root trail out of the clearing that the fairy’s in. And it’s a _long_ trail. It takes her nearly fifteen minutes for the root she’s following to get thicker and thicker and eventually meet up with the nastiest, gnarliest-looking wreck of a tree she’s ever seen in her life. It’s huge and twisted, knobbled and grey, and although there’s no leaves or any sign of green life on it whatsoever, it _has_ to be alive, somehow.

Ace presses her hand to it gingerly, and recoils again. It’s that same blast of hatred and malice, refracted through a mirror. This is the curse’s source, which means that destroying the tree is probably the best way of breaking it. But the tree’s just so _big._ She has no idea how she’s even start doing it. Chipping away with an axe? Some sort of magic spell that she doesn’t understand enough to cast?

She glares at the tree for another few seconds, willing it to understand just how numbered its days are. It’s _ugly._ She kind of wants to rip it apart with her bare hands, and she doesn’t entirely know why.

She doesn’t want to be there for any longer than she has to, because it’s giving her _wicked_ bad vibes, so it’s back to the clearing as fast as she can go. It takes less time now that she’s not following a great ruddy root tendril. The fairy’s still there in the dirt, breathing shallowly – face tilted up towards the thin rays of sun filtering through the forest canopy above.

Ace plops herself down on the ground next to them, and stares for a bit, considering.

“I’m gonna try and free you,” she tells them decisively. “Might take a while. I’m thinking maybe a week? It can’t be _that_ hard to wreck a massive evil tree.”

There’s no response, of course. They’re a pretty good listener, she decides. It’s nice to have someone who doesn’t interrupt or ask awkward questions about how she plans on wreaking her particular brand of destructive havoc.

“Don’t know if you can hear me,” she adds, “but if you can – you’d better be grateful about this when I do wake you up. I’m pretty busy, you know. Don’t just go around breaking curses and killing trees for anyone. Maybe you’ll owe me a favor? Isn’t that how fairies do their thing?”

She can think of one or two things that she could do with a fairy favor. Most books she’s read say that striking deals or bargains with fae beings is a really really bad idea, but this isn’t really like that, not really. If they want to give her a prize for doing the right thing, that’s just an awesome bonus. She’s the one getting to destroy an ugly tree, here. Really, _they’re_ doing her the favor. And, oh – the sun’s going down.

“Right! Gotta go.” She bounces to her feet, tightens the straps on her rucksack. “It was ace meeting you. Even if you probably can’t hear me, but – you know.” She hesitates for a second at the edge of the clearing. It feels super ridiculously wrong to just leave them exposed on the ground like this, but, well – what can she do? They’ve got their coat to keep them warm and it’s not like anyone else going to be able to move them from the roots. She hopes. She waves, despite the fact that they definitely can’t see her doing it. “Bye! Try not to die before I get back.”

There’s no response, but that’s kind of a given by this point.

(She had reckoned that she’d have to spend at least an hour trying to find her way back home, considering how much of an elaborate, roundabout path she had taken getting to the strange clearing – but it ends up taking her less than ten minutes.)

*

A week is not nearly enough to take down the tree or the curse it’s entangled with.

Initially, Ace had figured that taking an axe to the thinner branches and working her way up to splintering the larger ones and the trunk would be tedious but effective. Sourcing an axe is easy enough, although it does involve one very small theft that’s so easy it can barely be considered a crime. But as it turns out, her stupid tiny arms aren’t strong enough to swing the axe properly and besides the moment the blade collides with the tree it shatters into hundreds of tiny metal shards that catch at her face and neck and leave tiny little bleeding welts that sting but aren’t really that bad, all things considered. 

When Mum asks about it, sounding mostly disinterested, she says she’d got into a fight at school. She doesn’t know if she should be offended or pleased by how easily that lie is accepted. She settles for a grudging mixture of both. When she does actually manage to get into a fight at school several weeks later, Mum just sighs and reaches for another can of beer with a sour and disappointed expression on her face, and just says she’s not surprised.

She kind of hates her house. Hates her house and her room and her mum and just... everything about it. No wonder she’s spending so much time in the haunted fairy forest.

Well, either way – the axe thing is a bust. So then she tries to burn the curse-tree down, but the fire from her pocket lighter sputters out within an instant, and keeps on doing that no matter how many times she tries to set it alight. Even when she starts yelling angrily at it.

“Don’t tell anyone I said this, but that might be a good thing,” she tells the fairy as she hunts around the edge of their clearing for anything remotely resembling the spiky-leafed plant in her witch notebook that’s apparently good for her slightly singed fingers. “You lot are supposed to be keepers of the forest, right? Don’t reckon you’d be too happy with me if I accidentally burned the entire place down.”

With no way to get a bulldozer or wrecking ball in to just absolutely blitz the tree to the ground, she starts resorting to more elaborate and esoteric methods of tree destruction. She tries laying clumsy, half-baked counter-curses against the tree, and then tries charms and invocations that are even clumsier in form and somehow even less successful.

Her initial cheerful estimate of one week becomes “okay, end of this month – I’ve got it this time, _promise_ ,” – which slides into, “bet you anything I’ll work it out by the end of the year. It’ll be like a Christmas present for both of us!” and then she’s suddenly in ninth grade and the school starts cracking down harder on attendance policies which is both mean and _totally_ unfair.

More school means more work means less time to throw herself wholeheartedly at killing a really ridiculously evil tree – and less time to explore the forest. She manages to do both anyway. The tree thing and the forest-exploration, that is, not schoolwork. It’s the easiest thing in the world to sneak off into the trees after school (or sometimes during school hours, if she can manage it), slide into cat mode, and set off, bounding through the trees.

And she’s _careful_. Well, she’s not exactly careful, but she definitely knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t go tripping into fairy rings, never goes out on full moons, and is especially wary about doing anything that might anger the local population of Fair Folk that everyone’s always talking about. It’s not as if anyone’s around to talk to, so even if she were using her _real_ name – which she’s not, _Dorothy_ sucks and she hates it – that wouldn’t be a problem. Honestly, she doesn’t get why everyone’s all so worked up about the fae in the forest. Sure, fairies are a bit weird to deal with, but if you keep to yourself and don’t go sticking your hand right into fairy-shaped anthills, it’s not like anything really terrible’s going to happen.

So she goes climbing trees and picking plants and herbs to brew her makeshift homemade potions with, and keeps an eye out for a hagstone because she’s been really hoping to get her hands on one of those for ages now. The forest is vast and twisting and its paths aren’t necessarily the same from day to day, but after nearly a year of exploration, she can find her way around just fine. She barely even needs to try to make it to the cursed fairy’s clearing anymore.

The fairy themself is always there, half-buried in a shallow grave of dirt and grass. They don’t seem to age or need to eat or drink (which is something Ace has kept a close eye on) and they never seem to be bothered by local wildlife or the elements. In fact, Ace hasn’t seen a single living being apart from herself and them in the clearing she always finds them in since – well, since _ever._

She figures that the clearing itself is also cursed or enchanted or something to keep people away, which kind of begs the question _why her?_

By now, she’s pretty sure she’s the only witch in town, which is kinda depressing and really disappointing – old Mrs Smythe down near the edge of town _does_ have a bunch of bottles full of herbs and rocks and stuff on her porch and a horseshoe over her door, but it’s not like she actually does anything with them – so it might have something to do with that? Witch magic interacts with other magic in weird ways, from what she can tell, so maybe whatever curse this was collided with her own magic and – nope, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Between enduring her way through school and trying increasingly ridiculous methods to raze one singular curse-tree to the ground from whence it came, she ends up spending quite a lot of time in the fairy clearing. Not necessarily doing much curse-breaking – sometimes it’s homework, sometimes it’s witchy research and experimentation sort of stuff, and sometimes she just shows up with her lunch and her radio so she can blast music at someone who can’t yell at her to change the channel. (Radios don’t work in any other part of the forest, actually – it’s just this one section that seems to be immune to the weird static and silence that seems to result from her trying to tune into a station anywhere else.)

“Kinda wish you could talk to me,” she says through a mouthful of salami sandwich on one Friday afternoon, as something by the Cure that she doesn’t recognize echoes around the clearing. “I mean, if you _could_ talk to me, I wouldn’t need you to tell me how to get you out, but. Point still stands.” She frowns, first at her sandwich, then at them. “...I don’t even know your name. Or if you can, you know, hear me. Or if you like this music?” She studies their vague, shadowy face. “You look more like a classical music sorta person. Or maybe jazz. You’ve got the kind of kooky absentminded professor look, underneath all those drab rainbows. Hang on...”

She fiddles around with the dial on the radio until it switches from rock to something a bit lighter. The Jazz Warriors, apparently.

“There you go,” she says. “Just yell if you want me to change it, Professor.”

They don’t, of course, but it’s kind of the thought that counts. And they don’t object to the nickname, either, which means it sticks. She’d needed something to call them, and this is as good a name as any. If they have a problem with it, they can take it up with her once she’s woken them up.

Between school and exploring and curse-tree destruction, she barely spends any time at all at home, which is just fine by her. It’s worth the angry spiels and ranting from her mother. It’s even worth not being able to hide in her room, because she has a new place to hide now and someone who doesn’t mind her hiding out with them.

Her curse-tree assassination attempts kind of trail off after several months of this. They go from once a week to once every couple of weeks and then they just stop all together. It’s not that she’s given up – it’s completely the opposite, in fact. And it’s not that she’s trying to lull the tree into a false sense of security, although that is a nice bonus. See, Ace has been planning something big, and she’s been doing it for a while.

The local library doesn’t stock any witchy books, or anything to do with magic that isn’t ‘how to keep it away at all costs’, which means that she has to pick a good day and time to sneak off on the bus to the library in the next town over for all of her Really Big Plan research. And then there’s the hastle of getting a library card there when everybody seems to think she’s twelve because of her youthful face or something, and then she’s got to wait for the books she actually _wants_ to come in. And after that, she’s got to actually put the spells together and do some calculations and obtain the ingredients, and all in all it’s no wonder the whole thing takes so long. Three months of nonstop planning and scheming and ingredient-assembling, to be precise. But it’s worth it, and she thinks she knows what she’s doing – and more than that, she’s pretty sure she’s about ready to put it into action.

Which is why on October 30th, she breaks into the chemistry labs during recess, and spends a good hour brewing up the most dangerous potion she’s ever attempted. She crushes herbs and distils essences and carefully pours it all into a base of nitric acid and salt and a few drops of her own blood before setting it to boil. She’s more careful doing it than she’s ever been in her life, and with that carefulness comes an equal amount of nervousness. Her hands aren’t even shaking _that_ much, but all it takes is one uneven jerk of her hand and one slight splash of the finished product onto the still-lit Bunsen Burner, and the flames are spreading across the room.

Ace says something that’s probably extremely inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old. She pulls the fire alarm in a very responsible and mature response to the situation, before capping the potion with a wooden cork and bolting out the door.

Nobody catches sight of her beating a hasty retreat, and she manages to slip into the crowd of evacuated students milling out on the front lawn of the school. She’s very cautious about not bumping her bag or the bottle contained within it for the rest of the day, and the moment the bell rings, she’s out of there like a shot. It’s too much of a risk to go cat, especially when stuff stored in her bag tends to get jostled around and bumped a lot, so she goes on foot.

“I’ve got it this time! Promise!” she yells to the fairy as she passes through their clearing on the way to the tree. She’d like to imagine they smile a bit in response to this, but they probably don’t do anything of the sort.

And then she’s in front of the tree, and the tree is looming angrily in front of her like it knows exactly what she’s planning, and she whips the potion bottle out of her bag with a grin.

This is absolutely one of the most dangerous things Ace has ever done in her life. What’s in the bottle is powerful; ridiculously so – even more powerful than what she’d used to burn down an old house back in Perivale in a haze of righteous anger. The theory’s the same, though, and she knows just what to do.

First she uncorks the bottle and flings half of the liquid inside wildly at the tree, splashing it all around the roots and the branches and twigs. And then she shatters the bottle, the rest of it going all over the crooked, gnarled heart of the tree, and then she takes a step back and pulls out her lighter.

A flick of the finger reveals a lick of flame, hovering at the end. She says a silent goodbye to this particular lighter, and tosses it, flame and all, directly at the potion-soaked tree.

It goes up almost instantly in a glorious pyre of heat and light, and Ace stumbles backwards with a cry that’s half a yell of victory and half genuine shock and fear. And then she takes a step forwards, unable to look away. She can see creatures in the dancing flames and hear people calling and screaming in the crackles and pops of burning wood, and before she can stop herself she’s reaching forwards into the smoke and fire. It burns hideously for a brief second _,_ and then her hands make contact with the cold, twisted wood of the tree and the fire is, quite abruptly, gone.

Ace is standing next to the perfectly intact curse-tree, with nothing but a half-broken empty potion bottle and throbbing, painful hands to show for her efforts.

She can’t stop herself from screaming in frustration.

Ace just about trips her way back to the fairy’s clearing, hair singed and smoking, hands raw and burnt. It’s so much worse than it had been when she’d just been using the lighter, and it hadn’t even accomplished much more. At least she’d found the aloe vera this time, although she doesn’t know how much good it’ll do.

And the fairy’s still there, roots just as tight around them as ever. They haven’t moved in the _slightest,_ and they definitely haven’t woken up. Ace lets herself slide clumsily to the ground right next to them, and then falls backwards, hitting her head painfully against the solid, unforgiving earth. She lets out a low moan, although whether it’s due to the dull headache or the events of the last few minutes, it’s hard to tell.

“Sorry, Professor,” she tells the fairy. “Sorry, I – ”

She has to clear her throat, and scrub her sleeve roughly across her face to prevent tears of frustration from springing to her eyes. It doesn’t matter if nobody’s actually going to see her crying. It’s the principle of the thing.

“I thought that’d be the one,” she says when she’s sure she’s not going to start crying or yelling, staring blankly up at the sky beyond the treeline. “I was _sure_ I’d got it right. Maybe I’m just not powerful enough, maybe I’m – I’m just some stupid kid who’s poking her nose in where it doesn’t belong, _again_ – ”

And then she really does cry, but only for a bit, and when she’s done, she just sighs and rolls over so she doesn’t have to face the fairy.

“I know this is the _worst_ time to mention this,” she mutters into the ground. “But I’m actually a really rubbish witch.” A beat of silence. She realizes she’s getting dirt and grass all over her tear-stained face, and she huffs and sits up to wipe it off. “This is the bit where you tell me ‘no, you’re not; no, you’re being stupid, Ace’.”

They do nothing of the sort. She appreciates the non-existent sentiment anyway, and takes another moment to collect herself before she finishes wiping the dirt off her face, and sighs.

“I’m not going to leave you alone here,” she says, patting the fairy’s horrible technicolour sleeve firmly. “I’ll get you out. Promise. Even if it takes years and years, and even if I _can’t_ , I’ll keep visiting you.” Her jaw tightens and her fists clench. “Nobody deserves to be left alone like this.”

Ace stays there with them until the sun sets and the shadows start to creep up around her. When she does leave, it’s only because she can feel something approaching in the air around her, something much bigger than she can ever hope to be.

By tomorrow, she will be back to try again.


End file.
